Geddes on Directivity

[Zilch]

YO, SOUNDMINDED:

You are the site's third most prolific poster with 1227 posts restating the same off-topic diatribe.

[i think we get it. Was there something else...? ]

[soundminded]

YO, SOUNDMINDED:

You are the site's third most prolific poster with 1227 posts restating the same off-topic diatribe.

[i think we get it. Was there something else...? ]

I'm sure you would have outposted me Zilch if you hadn't been so busy shipping out those whatchamacallits.

[kkantor]

Howard, as a student of intellectual history, you know that the early Cycloanalysts wrote extensively on the neurotic complex we now call, Audiophilia Nervosa. The patient exhibiting severe symptoms of the disorder tends to confuse the act of "production" with the act of "reproduction." Their wish to have their audio equipment function as a musical instrument in turn stems from a deeply repressed desire to have their genitalia (reproductive organs) merge with their orifices of excretion (creative organs). However, as we know, such a physiological transformation is not possible, and the patients undergo ego-syntonic compromise formation, themselves acting out salient aspects of each and appearing as P---ks and A------es.

-k

[genek]

The Kitchen was created as a place to wring out contentious discussions that would be off-topic in other forums. No audio-related comment is off-topic here.

Personal jabs directed at other posters are not "audio-related comments," and will result in topic closure. Everybody play nice.

[soundminded]

Well, it is preposterous to even think of a loudspeaker reproducing the radiation pattern of a violin. Even if it could do it (and a weird design that sucker would have to be), it would then be unable to reproduce the radiation pattern of a trumpet or piano. Obviously, some kind of radiation-pattern compromise will be required.

What a speaker should do is input acoustic energy as smoothly into a room as possible. Whether it does that involves controlled, narrow directivity or wider angled, but still controlled directivity will depend upon the philosophical approach (and of course competency) of the designer. And whether the result of either approach satisfies the listener will depend upon the taste of that listener. Some like one type; some like the other type, and both individuals may be very competent themselves as listeners. The key is to have the speaker at the very least deliver smooth (and probably flat, although a downward slope towards the treble usually is beneficial, as is a mild elevation at the bass end) sound, with a decent bandwidth and distortion low enough to not have harmonics muddy the result.

As for absolutely and subjectively perfect duplicating the sound of a real-world, acoustic-instrument concert hall, well, I rather doubt that even your system could do that, given that we have a huge variability in recording quality from source to source. I think we can get a decent enough simulation to satisfy critical listeners, even though there is no way an audio rig can do a perfect job.

You seem to be mixing apples and oranges with some of your comments. You obviously think your sound-processor design will get us closer to realism, but at the same time you rail about the inadequacies of speaker design. Frankly, I think that speaker design these days and even for the past few decades has been pretty good, with the main limitation to absolutely realistic playback with an audio system involving two things: (1) recording quality and techniques and (2) the room/processor design and interface. Recording quality (at the beginning of the chain) is kind of hamstrung by the continued favoring of two channels (certainly, this is easier for engineers to deal with) and the room/processor design and interface situation (at the other end of the chain) is hamstrung by the nature of typical home-listening rooms, as well as financial limitations involving very complex processing and the need for lots of speakers to do the job. Whatever, no processor can overcome all of the limitations we have with most living-room layouts.

Frankly, I think you are being pretty unfair to the engineers out there who work to deliver the goods as best they can, given the impossible to solve nature of the problems. You make them sound like knuckle-dragging medievalists. As for your patent and research, something like that may have great potential (if it is as much like the Yamaha approach as you have indicated before, then obviously it has to be pretty good), but if that potential is not realized in practice the whole thing becomes worthless.

Howard Ferstler

I sometimes think I am among the few people who thinks about reproducing the sound of musical instruments that actually is interested in the instruments themselves and listens to them carefully, studies them, or even tries to figure out why it is valuable to reproduce those sounds. It seems to me to try to create electronic music reproducing systems without doing that is like trying to paint a picture of a horse without having ever seen one. If the result is equipment that performs flawlessly according to the measured performance specifications but doesn't sound like real music, then the specifications and test data are worthless because they are based on a flawed conceptual model. This isn't true of just audio equipment, the underlying principle is true for any engineering endeavor.

"Well, it is preposterous to even think of a loudspeaker reproducing the radiation pattern of a violin. Even if it could do it (and a weird design that sucker would have to be), it would then be unable to reproduce the radiation pattern of a trumpet or piano. Obviously, some kind of radiation-pattern compromise will be required."

When considerig why musical instruments sound the way they do, directivity is a very important consideration. It isn't necessarily the specifics of any one instrument, it is what their directivities have in common. One thing you notice is that nearly all musical instruments are multidirectional, often almost omnidirectional. In fact depending on how the instrument is constucted and where the listener sits compared to the performer, little or no sound eminated from most musical instruments reaches the listener through a direct path, just about all of it is the result of room reflections. This is easy to see by just walking around a musician when he is playing. Walk around a piano at a piano bar or someone practicing an instrument. There are many opportunities to hear musicians play where you don't have to sit in one seat. One thing to notice is that at any angle the loudness is about the same. Another is that the tone doesn't change much if at all. This means that the relative spectral content, the relationship between the fundimentals, lower harmonics, and higher harmonics stays about the same. It's easy to see why. For example, unless you are in direct line of sight of the strings, harp, or sounding board of a piano, all of its sound is reflected before it reaches you. Even with the lid propped open as in the photographs of the grand pianos on the Steinway web site I linked to, some of the sound propagated upward is reflected at the audience but much of it is scattered elsewhere. Now compare this to a loudspeaker placed in the middle of a room. In front of the loudspeaker you hear the most high frequencies. It may sound something like a piano. But walk around it and the sound gets duller and duller until when you are far off to one side or behind it, all you hear is a muffled blur. When you play recordings through it, no matter where it is placed in a room this muffled sound will also reach your ears. Unlike the real instrument where the reflections which arrive a few millisecond apart have about the same spectral content, the first sound of each note will have all of the high frequencies and subsequent reflections your brain will integrate with it will have none at all. This alone is sufficient to make them easily distinguishable. The fact that these reflections come from different directions and not from a point source also distinguishes the sound easily between the real thing and the reproduction. Most musical instruments in real rooms do not sound like point sources. This observation explains why even though the AR9s in my listening room have been corrected to produce a huge number of high frequency reflections, the highly directional nature of their sound between 200 hz and 6 khz means they can never duplicate the sound of the piano at the other end of the room. To re-engineer the AR9s as a multidirectional speaker would be so complicated that I might as well start from scratch.

One question I had when I re-engineered the multidirectional 901 speaker to produce both direct and reflected sounds that had the same harmonic relationships even taking into account the spectral selectivity of the reflecting surfaces of the room was how more directional instruments such as a human voice would sound played through them. For reasons I don't fully understand yet, they sound just like they ought to and are not enormous sources of sound but are close to point sources the way you'd want them to be.

"the main limitation to absolutely realistic playback with an audio system involving two things: (1) recording quality and techniques and (2) the room/processor design and interface."

1. Adjustments must be made for each recording individually. Which frequency band is the most important? All of them, there are none that aren't. Even a 1 db change over an octave is perceptable in changing the tone of instruments. Equally important is playing the recording at the correct loudness. Each instrument has a limited range of how loud it should sound which is determined by the nature, the power of the instrument itself, how it is being played, and its perceived distance. Too loud or too soft turns the sound into a caricature of the real thing. At the current state of the art, the only way to make these adjustments is by memory of what similar instruments sound like. It is time consuming, tedious, and requires many repetitive attempts to slowly approach their real sound.

2. Engineering and tuning the system for the playback room acoustics is also very time consuming, very tedious up to this point. I recently added an 8' x 11' oriental rug on top of a linoleum floor in a 14' x 14' room and it took nearly a week to get the system back to where it had been. Discussing recreating concert hall acoustics is so many orders of magnitude more complex I won't even attempt to talk about it here.

This problem is solvable but not by the approaches that have been taken up to now. Radically different designs based on far more powerful analysis and far deeper understanding of sound and prerception of sound are required than we now have. Repeatig an infinite number of variants on what has already been done will get no closer to a successful solution to it. Those who think so are only kidding themselves.

[genek]

I sometimes think I am among the few people who thinks about reproducing the sound of musical instruments that actually is interested in the instruments themselves and listens to them carefully, studies them, or even tries to figure out why it is valuable to reproduce those sounds.

I think you probably are, at least among designers or would-be designers. Didn't we just have a thread a little while ago that established that speaker designs today are mostly based on what the majority of people on listening panels prefer?

[Zilch]

If the result is equipment that performs flawlessly according to the measured performance specifications but doesn't sound like real music, then the specifications and test data are worthless because they are based on a flawed conceptual model. This isn't true of just audio equipment, the underlying principle is true for any engineering endeavor.

Worthless in the context of your objective, perhaps, but as Gene points up, statistically, nobody gives a whit. Music does not have to be "real" to be enjoyable as music.

If a sonic hologram were available for all to enjoy at home at reasonable cost, would that be the preferred paradigm? A good guess would be "Yes;" multi-channel already trumps two-channel stereo.

Are designers, engineers, and hacks working toward more realistic presentations of music? Well, sure, but you can also bet that moving the symphony hall into the living room is not the prime vector. If that occurs at all, it will merely come as artifact of putting Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, and Led Zep there....

[soundminded]

I think you probably are, at least among designers or would-be designers. Didn't we just have a thread a little while ago that established that speaker designs today are mostly based on what the majority of people on listening panels prefer?

Well that brings us full circle back to the question of what is high fidelity sound, what is its purpose. I think some would agree that once upon a time it was a pursuit by engineers, musicians, technicians, tinkerers to try to build machines that would play recordings that sounded as much like what they heard listening to live music as they could. For some it turned into a business, for others remained just a hobby. But at least at the time of AR in its heyday, that was their goal. Why else bother to go to the trouble of setting up LVR demos? What would have been the point if merely pandering to the popular demand of the market to make money was their real strategyt? Their aim seemed to be to build equipment that sounds more like real music than comepting equipment and more people would buy it. And it worked, AR had the lion's share of the speaker market. But somewhere along the line, as progress stopped and making money became the only object in life, as audiences got more ignorant because music was no longer taught in schools, the industry devolved into what it is now. If that is the goal, to make the most money by pandering to the most pocketbooks among the least experienced least knowledgable least critical in the market, then Floyd Toole is the man to talk to. He's the one who researched what people like most. And we could stop right there because as a 2 billion dollar a year corporation devoted it seems exclusively to manufacturing audio equipment for professional sound engineers and the non professional public, Harman Industries has defined what success means in this business...by that criteria.

How fortunate for those who still perform real music to display their skills for the entertainment of audiences that there is still a market willing to pay money to hear a $90,000 piano or a $10 million dollar violin played in a one million cubic foot room accompanied at times by a 100 piece orchestra without the adulteration of electronic amplifiers or loudspeakers to color their sound. At least for those people, the sound they hear live is the sound they'd like to hear in their homes when they can't get to a concert. Perhaps if that were possible, more people might take an interest in it. Perhaps they'd like it better than listening to earbuds and an MP3 player while jogging.

[genek]

How fortunate for those who still perform real music to display their skills for the entertainment of audiences that there is still a market willing to pay money to hear a $90,000 piano or a $10 million dollar violin played in a one million cubic foot room accompanied at times by a 100 piece orchestra without the adulteration of electronic amplifiers or loudspeakers to color their sound.

What's really fortunate, both for those who who make their living performing such music and for those of us who still enjoy hearing it, is that the idea of it still has enough status appeal for the monied philanthropists of our society to be willing to subsidize it through donations and bequests, because we don't constitute enough of a "market" to support it from ticket sales alone, and haven't for more than a few generations...if we ever did.

[kkantor]

The Kitchen was created as a place to wring out contentious discussions that would be off-topic in other forums. No audio-related comment is off-topic here.

Personal jabs directed at other posters are not "audio-related comments," and will result in topic closure. Everybody play nice.

Ah yes, I know. I wish I could put an "Expiration Date" on my posts, so I could amuse myself without leaving a permanent stain.

Anyway, I had no specific poster I was directing my comments at; rather a class/political wing within the world of audio.

-k

[soundminded]

Yes. I believe the problem (which may really not be a "problem" at all, given what most enthusiasts require from their home-playback rigs) cannot be solved, given the very different characteristics we find with typical home-playback environments. Aristotle once pointed out that was impossible to reach infinity with a finite line length if you continued to divide a line into segments (in principle, each segment could continue to be divided forever, although a point will be reached when it is impossible to measure or perceive the results), and this characteristic is similar to what engineers encounter in their quest for perfection. They can always get a tad closer, but once a certain point is reached any improvements are inconsequential, because the listening-room acoustics factor finally dominates.

You might be able to design a processor/speaker combination that would work in a very special room (no doubt, that room would have to be pretty large to begin with, as home-listening spaces go), but that combination would not work equally well in the majority of typical home-playback areas. It might work well enough to be plenty good sounding, but it would not achieve the perfection you appear to consider paramount. For me, getting that close is close enough, and I will continue to be satisfied with the results at my place.

There have been plenty of efforts to get the listening room to behave or to get it to have as little impact as possible. Some efforts have been better than others, but it is preposterous (that word, again) to say that nobody has worked on the issue. Bob Carver has, Geddes has, Dolby has, Ando Yoichi has, Peter Scheiber has, John Eargle has, David Hafler has, Ken Kantor has, Dave Grisinger has, Mark Davis has, Roy Allison has, Ed Villchur has, and Amar Bose has, too, as did even Thomas Edison, among a number of other designers. They may have failed in terms of reaching perfection, but I do not believe they failed dismally, and all of them moved the art further forward.

Indeed, as for failing dismally, you may have come up with a killer system, but the fact that it never got into production means that you have failed as dismally as any of the engineers you seem to think are downright unable to understand the problem at all. As for that scale from 0 to 100, while you award the best effort a mere zero, I will give some of the best efforts a solid 75, or even 80. Heck, when Villchur did his LVR sessions that number probably exceeded 95. That ain't half bad. The problem is very well understood, in my opinion, and that the problem cannot be solved is an indication that the best minds in the business are very aware of the problems and limitations. Frankly, I am not sure you are aware of those same problems and limitations, because you seem to think that the problem can be solved by the right design - probably meaning yours. I am a skeptic, and I do not think that any design can solve it to the percentage that will fool the listener into thinking what he is listening to puts him acoustically into a simulated concert hall sound space.

As for the Yamaha processor design (which has evolved considerably from the original DSP-1 unit), from what I have read their approach involved taking measurements in existing halls and then building processor programs that would duplicate the acoustic signatures of those various halls after somewhat cancelling the existing reverb on the recording. I am not sure if your program did that, or not, but I do know that they took the measurements and worked with the data and came up with some terrific results. However, not even their designs can handle all of the variables we find in typical home-listening rooms. The weakness involves those limitations (and other companies, such as Lexicon have faced the same limitations) and not any mysterious key to sound-space simulation that you appear to think you have.

In any case, the limitations that exist have more to do with processor/room interactions than speaker performance, although decently smooth, wide-bandwidth, and low-distortion performance from them is required, and I find it odd that you continue to talk about processor/room characteristics when what most people here are interested in are speakers.

Howard Ferstler

Your basic problem or disagreement with me is that you insist on thinking inside the box, you rigidly hold to viewing the problem using the same paradigm you've been taught all of your life. You will not consider that there may be entirely different approaches altogether that view the problem very differently. The current theory of room acoustics began with Wallace Sabine a little over a hundred years ago. It was a good start considering it began from nowhere but the theory that evolved from it and is built on it is far too limited, to imprecise, structured much too generally to give satisfactory answers at the level of detail to understand and solve these problems. Yet that is the work all of the people up to now have built on, that is what persists. Their thinking has been tunneled by the way they've been trained to view the problem. It is hard for someone to take a leap of faith that the earth is actually round when everywhere he's seen in his life looks as if it is flat. But if someone had been able to travel just 100 miles straight up, they'd have gotten a very different picture.

You seem preoccupied with digital signal processors, just as many others are preoccupied with amplifiers, speakers, phonograph cartridges, even wires. I am ultimately only concerned with sound fields, that is what the crux of the problem is really all about. Their size, shape, the way they propagate, how they interact, how they reach listeners, their timing, their vectors, and how the human brain interprets all of that information brought to it by two auditory nerves. What matters, to what degree, and what doesn't matter. The hardware is only a means to an end. BTW, I have never once even tried any of the canned programs Yamaha incorporated in its digital processor. Its only interest to me was in allowing me the flexibility even though to a limited degree to program it myself. Yamaha's programs are without doubt based on the same method of measurement rationalized by the same mathematical paradigm that has proven inadequate already. What Yamaha did of value to me was to precisely control certain variables previous equipment didn't. Subsequent DSPs Im aware of by Yamaha and others even when it has that capacity at all doesn't have it to the degree required. But even DSP-1 is only a toe in the water so to speak compared to what will be needed.

If there is one failing I've accepted it's my failure to market my idea. It hasn't had its full chance to be accepted or rejected yet, it's never been tried commercially, nor have I gotten anyone interested in it. I set it aside for many years and I'm only just coming back to the notion that with more advanced technology available today than 30 years ago, it may yet still have possibilities.

"There have been plenty of efforts to get the listening room to behave or to get it to have as little impact as possible."

Short of living in the hell of an anechoic chamber, wearing headphones, or building the ultimate directional loudspeaker connected to your ears by tubes, that is not possible. Every effort to defeat it has failed. Bose's efforts to exploit it had very limited success. His rationalization in his white paper for his direct reflecting principle as he stated it was ludicrous, its real value entirely different than he intended it to be. As for adapting the equipment to the room and not the other way around, it seems silly today to think of it but there was a time when you could not adjust the seat or steering wheel of a car to different sized drivers. They installed the fixed seat, the fixed steering column and if you couldn't reach the pedals or squeeze between the chair and the wheel that was your problem. That's about the philosophy of designers of audio components for sound systems today except they also want you to engineer and build the rest of the car yourself.

This brings me back to my first sentence. By restricting your views to this one paradigm, your evaluations are based on the degree of perfection equipment can achieve within the limits of that paradigm. You have rejected the original purpose of the entire effort conceding or at least accepting that anything beyond that is unattainable. Therefore I suggest that for anyone who still uses live music as their criteria for judging the value of this equipment, your reviews don't apply because they don't set that criteria as the standard. And for those that don't, your reviews are still of no value because they only reflect your opinion, your bias in what is valuable and what isn't. BTW, I'm not singling you out personally Howard, all of the other audio equipment reviewers do exactly the same. It's part of what has become a cult with its various witchdoctors, soothsayers, and tribal followers. I only march to the beat of my own drum.

[kkantor]

No progress?????????

State of the Art, 1934:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2009/04/20/...k-sings-speaks/

State of the Art, 1939:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/07/19/...o-conduct-band/

State of the Art, 1941:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/04/20/...goes-classical/

Mickey Mouse Goes Classical

By ANDREW R. BOONE

MOVING sound has been added to moving pictures to bring greater realism to the screen. Accompanying Walt Disney’s newest Technicolor creation, “Fantasia,” in which Mickey Mouse and a host of new companions perform to the rhythms of classical music, this latest Hollywood invention made its first public appearance a few weeks ago at the Broadway Theater in New York.

Moving sound is literally that. Four circuits using sixty loudspeakers make it possible to chase music right around an audience, out of the screen and back into it, or make notes die away into infinity overhead. The sound equipment alone fills thirty-five packing cases. For that reason “Fantasia” will be screened only in selected metropolitan theaters where the speaker systems can be installed.

Two years of painstaking work by Disney, R.C.A. engineers, and 1,000 Disney assistants went into “Fantasia,” which is really a pictorial interpretation of seven great compositions. The music is by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. Deems Taylor, music critic and composer, aided in making the production.

Behind “Fantasia” lies Walt Disney’s desire to always give the public something new and better than what they have known in the past.

“We know,” he said recently, “that music emerging from one speaker behind the screen sounds thin, tinkly, and strainy. We wanted to reproduce such beautiful masterpieces as Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria,’ and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony so that audiences would feel as though they were standing on the podium with Stokowski.”

To achieve this effect, he knew that means must be found to spread sound throughout the theater, that “point sources” must be concealed from the ear. The sound recordings must be such that each and every instrument or voice would be heard clearly and distinctly in its proper proportion to the whole orchestral effect.

The recording alone for “Fantasia” took almost eighteen months. Approximately 3,000,000 feet of sound track from individual takes, prints, and remakes were condensed into the final 10,778-foot, four-track negative.

Neither Disney nor the engineers knew just where the experiment would lead when the 110 members of the orchestra first took their places on the stage of the Philadelphia Academy of Music early in April, 1939. Thirty-three microphones faced the musicians. From them nine channels carried the music to nine recorders set up in the basement of the building. Seven channels transmitted sounds from individual groups of instruments such as the wood winds and the violins. The eighth caught the complete orchestration, while the ninth carried the beat of a telegraph instrument which later enabled the animators in Hollywood to fit the action of “Fantasia” to the tempo of the music.

Seven weeks Stokowski and the orchestra labored. All that time a second director faced the recording instruments, guiding the recording on film of each passage. From a duplicate score he brought choirs in and out, stepped up solos. Engineers tuned volume controls, guided by oscilloscopes which told them just how much sound was coming through their machines.

Exactly 483,000 feet of sound track were recorded in forty-two days. Cans of film were shipped by air to Hollywood for processing. After that retakes were made where necessary to obtain exactly the desired tonal combinations of choirs, soloists, and instruments.

Then came the problem of mixing these sound tracks into one realistic whole. First the engineers tried multiple speakers fed by a single sound-transmission system. That spread the sound over a wide area, but when the characters spoke, the synchronization of words and lip movements was lost.

There were further experiments before the producers were satisfied. The solution was finally found in combining the nine tracks into four; three for “entertainment sounds,” such as voices, music, and special effects, and the fourth for a control frequency governing the volume of the other three.

Operators in the projection booths of theaters where “Fantasia” is presented will face no unusual complications. Their problems will be the routine ones of threading the film and focusing the picture.

[Carlspeak]

Well that brings us full circle back to the question of what is high fidelity sound, what is its purpose. I think some would agree that once upon a time it was a pursuit by engineers, musicians, technicians, tinkerers to try to build machines that would play recordings that sounded as much like what they heard listening to live music as they could. For some it turned into a business, for others remained just a hobby. But at least at the time of AR in its heyday, that was their goal. Why else bother to go to the trouble of setting up LVR demos? What would have been the point if merely pandering to the popular demand of the market to make money was their real strategyt? Their aim seemed to be to build equipment that sounds more like real music than comepting equipment and more people would buy it. And it worked, AR had the lion's share of the speaker market. But somewhere along the line, as progress stopped and making money became the only object in life, as audiences got more ignorant because music was no longer taught in schools, the industry devolved into what it is now. If that is the goal, to make the most money by pandering to the most pocketbooks among the least experienced least knowledgable least critical in the market, then Floyd Toole is the man to talk to. He's the one who researched what people like most. And we could stop right there because as a 2 billion dollar a year corporation devoted it seems exclusively to manufacturing audio equipment for professional sound engineers and the non professional public, Harman Industries has defined what success means in this business...by that criteria.

How fortunate for those who still perform real music to display their skills for the entertainment of audiences that there is still a market willing to pay money to hear a $90,000 piano or a $10 million dollar violin played in a one million cubic foot room accompanied at times by a 100 piece orchestra without the adulteration of electronic amplifiers or loudspeakers to color their sound. At least for those people, the sound they hear live is the sound they'd like to hear in their homes when they can't get to a concert. Perhaps if that were possible, more people might take an interest in it. Perhaps they'd like it better than listening to earbuds and an MP3 player while jogging.

Check out post #154 here

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...1334&st=140

and the few others that followed it on the same page.

We've been down this road more than once and it's growing tiresome

[Carlspeak]

Obviously, you think that everybody else in the business (journalists, designers, recording engineers, etc.) have not only blown things in terms of design requirements and evaluation techniques, but that they also have no idea about what they are doing or supposed to be doing.

On the other hand, you seem to think you have the key. The problem is that until we see the results of what that "key" can do all of your opinions about the inadequate, inconsequential, or incompetent work done by others in the business is not much more than just that: opinions. Without results we can experience that deliver the goods, opinions mean nothing.

Howard Ferstler

I think the problem with SM's "KEY" is he's afraid someone might steal it (again) and rob him of his life's work. OTOH, he might consider stepping up and publishing his work before he dies and perhaps have a legacy audiophiles might at least be aware of (like Heyser) rather than his sad legacy here on this remote web site of preaching the inadequacies of recording/reproduction audio engineering as it has progressed to date.

Don't get me wrong. I think SM's a very bright, albeit bitter man.

[kkantor]

Check out post #154 here

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...1334&st=140

and the few others that followed it on the same page.

We've been down this road more than once and it's growing tiresome

Carl,

I hear you, and share some of your frustration. However, there are a few different perspectives I try to remember:

1- This is not a static community... new people come in over time, existing members venture into new areas, etc. It's natural and healthy that certain fundamental issues get rehashed, provided appropriate references to older threads are cited by those who know them.

2- All very difficult problems benefit from periodic rehashing. Sometimes, new light is shed, often not.

3- This place is like every other open internet audio "community" I know of: a social club where the bulk of the population consists of serious amateurs, interacting with a few noobs and a few pros. 99.9999% of discussions on internet audio groups, and articles in hobbyist magazines, are decades behind the real state of knowledge in our field. Even more often, the topics are completely orthogonal to what pros are thinking about as the true issues we face. Do you really think that modern professional speaker designers think about capacitor audibility, or debate bass enclosure benefits or crossover slopes, or believe feedback is a bad idea, or think anyone can hear the difference between connector types, or wonder if MP3's sound bad? (Sure, professional gurus and pundits are easy to find, but I am talking about real, competent design engineers who are out there making designs that go to market.)

What I am getting at is that I would rather have 10 rehashed debates about radiation pattern, no matter how ignorant or dogmatic some of the participants are, than the constant, unbroken stream of....

"Should I recap my speakers?"

"Please recommend an amp for my...?"

"Tubes or transistors, what do you use?"

"Wires, the secrets the scientists are missing."

"Vinyl, it's coming back!"

"What are the best cheap speakers for classic rock?"

"I improved my AR666 with baffle step compensation."

etc.

-k

BTW- somehow, my thread navigation menu got messed up. Did this happen to others? Thx!

[Carlspeak]

Carl,

I hear you, and share some of your frustration. However, there are a few different perspectives I try to remember:

-k

K, my post was not directed at the directivity discussion per se. It was directed at SM's repetitive position regarding reproduction of live music. These posts don't move the topic forward.

Perhaps my post was a bit more blunt than your pithy post #33 which, I feel, said the same thing....

BTW, no problems with my navigation within the site.

[genek]

Considering that we're talking about products that have not been manufactured and sold new for years, decades and in the case of some models, more than half a century, there really is not all that much that can be said that will not be repetitive and possibly tiresome to someone who's been around a long time.

There are already enough forums online where some asking a question or offering an opinion is treated to unfriendly and sometime downright nasty replies saying "go search the old messages," don't you think? Mark wants CSP to be a more civil place for people to discuss their interests in classic speakers. That's why messages that are repetitive and possibly tiresome to someone are not a reason to move a topic to The Kitchen or shut it down, but the unfriendly or nasty messages are.

Ken, if the navigation issue you're experiencing is the same one Carl asked about recently (the display changing modes between inline and threaded), I think this is caused by either the site or your browser losing your preference setting. This happens to most of us at one time or another. If it's something else, PM me and I'll see if we can figure it out for you.

[soundminded]

K, my post was not directed at the directivity discussion per se. It was directed at SM's repetitive position regarding reproduction of live music. These posts don't move the topic forward.

Perhaps my post was a bit more blunt than your pithy post #33 which, I feel, said the same thing....

BTW, no problems with my navigation within the site.

"my post was not directed at the directivity discussion per se. It was directed at SM's repetitive position regarding reproduction of live music."

Given the state of the art and the products offered on the market today, I can readily understand why anyone associated with the design, manufacture, or sale of expensive audio systems especially loudspeakers wouldn't want the sound of real musical instruments, music, recordings concert hall acoustics, or anything related to them discussed. And aren't they all crawling out of the woodwork to say so

[Zilch]

Operatively, there is a distinction:

I've got other people's ideas on other message boards to ridicule too you know.

[soundminded]

Operatively, there is a distinction:

Zilch, you know who you remind me of?

J Simmons from Pismo Beach!

[kkantor]

Considering that we're talking about products that have not been manufactured and sold new for years, decades and in the case of some models, more than half a century, there really is not all that much that can be said that will not be repetitive and possibly tiresome to someone who's been around a long time.

There are already enough forums online where some asking a question or offering an opinion is treated to unfriendly and sometime downright nasty replies saying "go search the old messages," don't you think? Mark wants CSP to be a more civil place for people to discuss their interests in classic speakers. That's why messages that are repetitive and possibly tiresome to someone are not a reason to move a topic to The Kitchen or shut it down, but the unfriendly or nasty messages are.

Ken, if the navigation issue you're experiencing is the same one Carl asked about recently (the display changing modes between inline and threaded), I think this is caused by either the site or your browser losing your preference setting. This happens to most of us at one time or another. If it's something else, PM me and I'll see if we can figure it out for you.

Of course, I do agree. I've never moderated a forum on the internets, but I am certain it is no easy task.

-k

[Zilch]

Zilch, you know who you remind me of?

J Simmons from Pismo Beach!

Nah, "Headbanger," remember?

[Crank it UP, Soundminded; pretend your Bose can handle the REAL deal! ]

[RoyC]

Nah, "Headbanger," remember?

[Crank it UP, Soundminded; pretend your Bose can handle the REAL deal! ]

patent pending

Roy

[Zilch]

Does Ken's LUNCHBOX amp incorporate this feature?

[kkantor]

Nah, "Headbanger," remember?

[Crank it UP, Soundminded; pretend your Bose can handle the REAL deal! ]

Better version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrm8s7Dd56Y